OS Neutral Witcher 3 will have 16 DLCs - for free

16 DLCs for the Witcher 3 will be free after release, regardless of platform. I was on the fence about jumping into this new one right away but CD Projekt Red is working hard to earn some love from players.

It's gonna take a helluva machine to run. If you look at The Witcher 2, it was optimized to hell and back over the course of its life (at least on Windows it was), and it still required a pretty sharp machine to run with all the bells and whistles on.

Just by looking at the pictures, and watching the videos, you can easily see it's even more detailed and graphically intense than The Witcher 2 was, so I can imagine it'll require that much more hardware to run well.

Apple's current lineup of desktops will be able to run it well, but I think their laptops are gonna be SOL as far as this game goes.

That sounds great, but makes no sense. Why make 16 DLCs and give them away for free? Wouldn't it be better just to include them in your game and release your epic all at once?

If it's due to time, and they want to develop the story, characters, environments, etc. after release, wow. That really would be something!

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Quoting from the CEO's open letter on the subject:

"As gamers, we nowadays have to hold on tight to our wallets, as surprisingly right after release, lots of tiny pieces of tempting content materialize with a steep price tag attached. Haven't we just paid a lot of cash for a brand new game? As CD PROJEKT RED, we strongly believe this is not the way it should work and, with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, we have decided to do it differently. Cutting to the chase, everyone who buys Wild Hunt will receive 16 specially prepared DLCs absolutely for free, regardless of platform."

Personally I think console owners may be a bit more sensitive to DLC pricing given they probably deal with it more often on games like CoD, Destiny, etc than maybe pc and mac owners since most pc/mac games don't really carry much DLC. So for console owners this is probably a great incentive and value from the start. No need to wait for game of the a year edition etc.

As far as timeline CD Projekt Red has already moved the release date back from 2014 to 2015 to ensure a smooth launch so all the DLC is likely stuff they'll be working on and adding afterwards to keep buzz up on the game, giving it a longer life. But more importantly they probably just aspire to have their game and company highly respected amongst the competition and realize (long term) it's not in their interest to squeeze money from players at every possible opportunity (Blizzard, EA) or hamstring a game experience with junky DRM (Uplay, Ubisoft).

Remember this game is bigger than Skyrim, has a 50hr main storyline with some 30+ endings, and over 100hrs of gameplay so 16DLCs on top of that and you start to see the massive ambition the Witcher 3 is carrying from the start.

I still have to finish the second one. After purchasing a capable notebook that I could actually play some games on, I pretty much stopped using my gaming desktop even though it has way better performance.

Releasing free DLC has as someone said earlier the huge benefit of getting free publicity over time. But, it also gives the devs more time to finish the game and then after it's release they can spend time on horse armors and other things.

CDPR has shown time after time that they are a company that takes care of their customers and their business model is fair.

Releasing free DLC has as someone said earlier the huge benefit of getting free publicity over time. But, it also gives the devs more time to finish the game and then after it's release they can spend time on horse armors and other things.

CDPR has shown time after time that they are a company that takes care of their customers and their business model is fair.

However their mac ports have been atrocious.

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Did they do the ports themselves or was it a 3rd party company that did them?

Did they do the ports themselves or was it a 3rd party company that did them?

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First port was wine, and they never claimed it to be anything else.

However second port was done by Virtual Programming.
Getting support for W2 was impossible and the port was truly terrible.

Same goes for most of their other ports. Crusader Kings 2 had graphical issues and loading times was seriously long. Europa Universalis 3 was crashing like every 15 minutes on my MBA.

If CDPR doesn't make an in-house Mac port, then I hope they will team up with Feral or Aspyr, because they actually seems to do good work and actually listens to their customers and give replies when they are confronted by customers.

I like CD Projekt Red much more than the behemoths (Looking at you EA and Ubisoft). These days a lot of games are released unfinished with day-one patches then loads of expensive DLCs. This provides little incentive to buy any brand new game at all seeing how everything will be on sale at some point.

I never finished the first game, gameplay was kind of clunky though the lore was pretty interesting. Hell, I found Neverwinter Nights 2 gameplay more smooth. I really want to get into The Witcher 2 some time before the launch, but guess I probably need to hurry as I don't buy brand new games anyway.

Despite playing quite a few games on this iMac (spec below), I decided to go PS4 for this game. I'm guessing it'll look as good on there as it does on this iMac (at native resolution with settings that give me reasonable FPS) so I'm happy with that choice.

The main game is huge anyway. Gamespot's video review calls it huge and graded it with a 10. The reviewer said that he played for 100 hours through the main story and still had left with lots of things to do.

The DLC - especially since it's coming for free - is actually content that couldn't make it to the game release deadline, due to bugs, incomplete etc. As far as DLC is not used to milk people's wallets, it's a good thing as it keeps the game alive longer.

That's one hell of a clever sales pitch to make people think they are getting loads of stuff for free on release.

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I do think part of it is marketing. These days large companies are constantly releasing games with tons of DLC for sale. CDPR is making a statement by releasing tons of DLC for free.

What I think some of the other part of it is, is that they have additional ideas that lay beyond the initial scope/plan of the original game. These ideas are going to take materially more time than the desired release date will allow. Why delay a game for 2-3 years when you can just release those additional ideas as DLC, letting customers enjoy the game as-is while the DLC is being developed.

Additionally, I think some of the other part is that it seems to fit their ecosystem. The Witcher 1 was a passion project. They made enough money creating something they enjoyed that allowed them to continue their passion and create a sequel. People who love what they do (I'm assuming this is CDPR leadership in this case) want to share their art with the world as soon as possible and they don't want to ruin the magic of sharing what they love--creating something special. Selling the DLC for money would kind of ruin that magic, making their game just like every other triple-A title release.

I discovered W1 after the enhanced edition was released, but I stuck around to buy W2 at release. If it's all marketing and I'm completely wrong with my opinions then it is some very clever marketing, because I do think they have something special and I hope this grows to other companies, even if it is an illusion.

One of reasons Developers are going away from traditional sales is the fact, that games dies soon after the release, and were not bringing money after. Huge spike in salary after the release, and then huge spike in decrease of sales.

Blizzard went one of the smartest ways in this business: game in 3 parts each other sold separately, but requires earlier release to play. SC2, and D3 are still alive.

Free 2 Play are a different story. But yet, DLCs are one of the ways to keep the game alive after the release.

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